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Sean Lucas and Me

Sean Lucas and Me

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am by Peter Leithart

Sean Lucas and Me 2017-09-07T00:02:16+06:00 Peter Leithart

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A while back, Covenant Seminary’s Sean Lucas reviewed my book Against Christianity . I read the review at the time, not carefully, and quickly found other things to do. Few things are more boring than defending what I’ve written. With the recent release PCA statement on the Federal Vision, and Lucas’s presence on the committee, however, some friends have suggested that I take a look at the review again and respond to it.

I understand that Lucas has distanced himself from the tone of his review; fair enough. But I understand that he also stands by the substance of the review, so I’ll respond at that level. I don’t have the patience for a complete point-by-point response, but this is still far too long.

1. The comparison to Newman mystifies me. Is Lucas claiming that I’m heading to Rome? He suggests as much at the end of his review. If so, he’s wrong. Is he saying that my book aims for a “counter-reformation” in the evangelical and Reformed world?

If so, I confess it. It’s true. I have a dream: That someday every week, every baptized man, woman, and child in every Reformed church around the globe would be eating and drinking with Jesus. I have a dream: That someday the whole Bible will be taught in all its fullness and power, that Reformed churches will chant and sing the Psalms, that the Bible be in our marrow and plasma as it was for the church fathers, medieval monks, and Reformers. I have a dream: That someday the Reformed churches will really be more of a threat to modern secularism than we are to one another.

Call me a dreamer. I think I share much of this dream (admittedly, not all) with Calvin and Luther and Bucer.

2. Lucas complains that I challenge “confessionally-defined” terms like “Bible” and “salvation” and “theology.” I’m not sure where any Reformed confession defines “theology” or “Christianity,” or where I’ve challenged the Reformed understanding of the “Bible.” (For the record, I don’t advocate the adoption of the Apocrypha into the canon.)

Yet, in general Lucas is right. I have challenged what are standard definitions of a number of terms. To some degree, these challenges are based on my reading of contemporary theology, which, at its best, tries to liberate Christian theology from non- and anti-Christian modern confinements (ie, recognizing that confining “theology” to topics that fit into the standard loci is part of the liberal policing of the sacred). Perhaps I have been seduced by postliberal theology in unhelpful ways; I hope not, but I acknowledge the possibility. In the main, my intention, if not my achievement, is to challenge definitions from Scripture. If our theological language has become brittle and narrow, it seems that refreshing it from the Bible is all to the good. That’s what I, and most of my friends, aim to do.

3. As to theological influences: I have read a good bit of Hauerwas and Milbank was my doctoral supervisor. I am shamefully ignorant of Barth. I’ve learned more from James Jordan than from all these other contemporary theologians combined. My original influence, though, was Calvin. The Fourth Book of the Institutes was a revelation – laying out a churchly and sacramental vision of Christian life quite at odds with much of the ethos of American evangelicalism, and to some degree at odds with the ethos of American Reformed theology.

4. Lucas recognizes that my advocacy of Christendom puts me at odds with Hauerwas, Yoder, and many other contemporary theologians whose work I have read with appreciation. He summarizes my position thus: Leithart “desires a massive conflict of cities-the church polis and the secular polis locked in mortal combat with the church emerging triumphant with the assistance of Christ. Then the church would be nothing less than the City of God on earth, with a full orbed culture-an eschatological arts, science, literature, and worship fully transformed by the Church-over which Christ reigns. A
culture war, indeed. Think of him as a postliberal reconstructionist.”

That last comment is fairly apt, though having never been a liberal I’m not a post-liberal. For the rest, some points: Whether I “desire a massive conflict” is irrelevant – Jesus says there is and will be a massive conflict, which we carry out with the powerful weapons of the Spirit; the church is not going to become a culture or the city of God – as I read the NT, it is already, and my book advocates that we learn to act like a city.

As to the church-as-culture, Lucas’s summary is somewhat misleading. When I speak of the church as culture, I am talking about the marks of the church – Word, Sacrament and Discipline – not about art, science, or literature. I’m fine with the church-as-church sponsoring the arts – how else can we have church buildings without sponsoring the art of architecture? But I don’t see that as inherent in the church’s mission. Even in the most primitive situation, a church that preaches the word, celebrates sacraments, and exercises discipline is a culture. I expect and hope to see the ecclesial culture inspire and shape the arts, politics, science, and everything else. In fact, I don’t have to hope; much of Western civilization is precisely the result of the penetration of the ecclesial culture and Word and Sacraments into the wider world. But I don’t see those cultural pursuits as inherent in the church, or necessarily as church-sponsored.

5. Lucas claims that I aim for a “postliberal adaptation of the Reformed faith.” This overstates the influence of postliberalism, strictly speaking, on my theological work. I’ve read my Lindbeck and my Frei, and also a number of theologians influenced by the postliberals. But I agree with Milbank’s criticisms of postliberalism, and would, in any case, say that my book, insofar as it’s aiming at the Reformed world, aims at a “catholic” (small-c, not Roman) adaptation of the Reformed faith.

6. Turning to more substantive theological claims, Lucas says that “Leithart somehow claims that the church is salvation in its corporate representation and (presumably) to be part of the church is to be saved. This, in turn, leads to a new (to the Reformed tradition) emphasis upon baptism as the means for entering the church’s salvation, which logically leads to the idea that to be baptized is to be saved.”

Lucas has hit on what I think is the crucial issue in the whole Federal Vision bruha: Ecclesiology. I think, though, that he has equivocated on some of his terms here. When I say that the church is “salvation,” I am playing one of what Lucas describes as my word games.

Here’s the argument, or one of them: God created man as a social being; God saved man; therefore, God saved man as a social being, restoring Him to true sociality; therefore, salvation must take a social form; if salvation is already achieved, it must have been achieved in social form; the church is that social form of salvation.

This argument must be crossed (as it is in my book) with the already-not yet: The church is the new humanity, the location where God has begun to save the human race; but the church is not yet the consummated new humanity, because God has not yet finished saving the human race. Some within the church will be cut off in time, others at the last judgment. But the presence of false sons, the presence of some who will not finally be saved, does not change the reality of the church as the restored human race.

Baptism is the induction to the new humanity. But Lucas’s logic only works if when I use “saved” with reference to the church I mean “eter

nally saved.” But I don’t. So there’s no logical inference to be had; and I simply don’t teach that everyone who is baptized is eternally saved. Nobody, I dare say, has ever taught that, and I don’t aim to be the first.

The point can be made in terms of 1 Corinthians 10. Who was saved from Egypt? All Israel. Who was baptized into Moses in the cloud and sea? All Israel. Who drank from the spiritual Rock that was Christ? All Israel. Who persevered to the promised land? Not all Israel. Many fell in the wilderness.

In sum, Lucas has defined “salvation” in his own terms, not mine, and then drawn logical inferences that only follow if he uses his definitions, not mine. He’s free to stipulate his own definitions, but testing my arguments by his definitions doesn’t seem exactly fair.

7. Much the same thing happens in his discussion of the Supper. Defining the reality of the Supper in terms of individual personal benefits, he complains that I confuse this “reality” with participation in the “sign.” But I’m not using that narrow, individual definition of the reality of the Supper. The reality of the Supper is that people from every tribe and tongue and nation sit to eat at the same table; that’s part of the (already) restoration of humanity. And, yes, everyone who sits down to eat and drink at the table is participating in that reality, even the most hypocritical racist imaginable.

8. Many of Lucas’s comments are genuine differences of theological opinion. Yet, when he says that I condemn the view that faith is the “individual appropriation of God’s gospel of grace in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit whereby an individual is united to Christ, receiving a new status before and power to obey God” as “the heresy of Christianity in a nutshell,” he’s being dishonest or incompetent. He’s quoting from page 78, where I write that the claim that ” religion is private ” is “the heresy of Christianity in a nutshell.”

If he thinks that my argument for an inherently public Christian faith is at odds with a demand for personal faith, then I begin to suspect he has succumbed to “Christianity” as I use the term. This suspicion is strengthened by his comment that “In the sense that God has accommodated himself to our capacity by giving us warrant for his
own ‘rituals,’ namely baptism and Supper, we can agree. Yet the crucial thing is not the ritual, but faith in Jesus Christ.” I find “accommodation” confusing and unnecessary, but Lucas is right that I’m talking about baptism and the Supper when I speak of “rituals.”

But Lucas’s polarization of “ritual” over against “faith” is precisely the view I’m contesting; the notion that the “crucial thing” is the (private) faith, not what the (public) ritual represents, I claim in the book, is an accommodation to modern arrangements designed precisely to keep Christian faith – at least its crucial aspects – safely hidden away in private.

A fair bit of Lucas’s review goes on to charge that I’ve minimized the need for personal faith, and replaced personal faith with “ritual” that works automatically in programming us to speak Christian language and act out Christian virtues. Perhaps I could have been more explicit in talking about personal faith. But I do say, quite early in the book, that “To be a Christian means to be refashioned in all of one’s desires, aims, attitudes, actions, from the shallowest to the deepest . . . . As the late liturgical scholar Mark Searle put it, everyone has a way of ‘leaning into life,’ and the Christian strives to ‘lean into life,’ all of life, Christianly.” Lucas may not recognize that as a description of personal faith, but that’s what it is.

9. Lucas says, “What distinguishes the New Covenant from the Old is not the difference in rituals. What distinguishes the New Covenant from the Old is that the Redeemer has come and that entrance into his community is by Spirit-wrought faith in him, the sign of which is baptism. This, as Leithart has to know, is the mainstream Reformed tradition back to Calvin; to move away from it is to move toward something else.”

I do not know that. Does Calvin say that the difference between Old and New is not a difference in ritual? Was faith not required for Israelites in the Old Covenant? Does Calvin say that? I think not. Calvin says that the substance of both covenants is the same, and that the way of salvation is the same in both. They differ in “administration,” which means, in large measure, in “ritual.”

10. If not to Rome, then, Lucas says, I’m heading toward oldline Protestantism, where all my suggestions have been tried and failed. “Vibrant ‘Christianity,’” he argues, “does not come by way of ritual alone or ritual primarily; it comes by a whole-souled faith in Jesus.”

To this, I can think of nothing better than to appeal to Luther, who, in David Yeago’s analysis, turned more fully to Reformation the more fully he turned to the Catholic tradition of sacramental theology and Christology.

Here’s the issue: Lucas calls the church to “whole-souled faith in Jesus.” So do I. But where is this Jesus to be found? How am I to have communion with him? Can I find him in the deepest recesses of my heart? How can I distinguish between Jesus in my soul and my own urges and desires, between Jesus in my soul and indigestion? No, I need to look outside myself, to the places where Jesus has promised to meet me. Where’s that? In Word and Sacrament. He’s promised to be there, and when I go looking for Him there, I’ll find Him.

That’s the whole “program” of my book: A restoration of the primacy of Word and Sacrament (which is a restoration of the primacy of Jesus!). Counter-reformational? Perhaps; but only insofar as the Reformed churches have drifted from the original vision of the Reformation.

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